The Underlying Mechanism of Gravity

A drawdown in the Aether pressure of deep space, produced by the steady flow of Aether that powers the atom. The drawdown across the atom, and the flow feeding it, lower the Aether pressure around matter — producing a depression and a gradient. This is what we call gravity.

1. What Is Happening

Before any arithmetic, the whole of it in one page.

Space is full — not empty — Aether at enormous pressure, the same everywhere except where matter is.

Every atom draws Aether through itself. In at the waist, out along the spin axis. The same amount leaves as arrives, but it leaves at lower pressure, because the machine took work out of it.

The Aether cannot replace it instantly. Flow through space is restricted, so around any lump of matter the draw runs a little ahead of the resupply and the pressure sits slightly low. That is the depression.

Depressions add: more atoms in one place, the deeper it goes. And anything sitting on the slope gets pressed toward the bottom, because the Aether pushes harder on its far side than its near side.

That push is gravity. Nothing pulls.

If the flow were unrestricted there would be no depression and no gravity. The restriction is not an inconvenience in this account — it is the mechanism.

Ten of them, in a line and in the round

And the two halves are the same quantity. Flow follows the pressure gradient in proportion to it, so the speed at which Aether is replaced at any point and the strength of gravity at that point are not two separate things. The replacement rate is the gradient.

The machine is the one set out in 5.22 The Universal Dynamo — the same shape found in a bathtub vortex, a tornado and a quasar, and proposed there to run the atom as well. Only one property of it matters here: it draws, and the Aether cannot go through instantly.

Set them in a duct, one behind the next, and each takes a small bite of the pressure it sees. The drop is the same at every station because the duct area never changes, so the gradient is constant — which is what g feels like standing on the ground. That is the whole of gravity as anyone experiences it: a uniform push, because we only ever sample a small patch of a very large field.

Gather the same machines into a body and the geometry does the rest. Aether now arrives from every direction and has to cross a shell whose area grows as r². The same draw spread over a growing surface gives a depression falling as 1/r, and a gradient falling as 1/d².

One machine, two geometries, and the two things gravity does.

The scale, fixed once

Deep space is the full tank. Zero is an empty one, and pressure cannot go below it. Every atom lowers the level a little, and nothing ever raises it back to the deep-space level.

Earth’s centre draws down two parts in a billion of what is available. Only a neutron star draws it down visibly, and a black hole is where the tank runs out. Section 13 gives the working.

What follows from it

Those four statements are not loose description. Written as equations they are a standard set, already used every day for something else entirely, and section 8 shows what they reduce to. Three things come out of it:

• Outside matter the force falls as 1/d².
• The force tracks mass exactly, without that being put in.
• G stops being a bare constant.

The rest of this memo is that argument in full, the objections it has to answer, and what it still cannot do.

2. Why Mass Clumps

The same mechanism that makes a body heavy is what gathered the body in the first place. It is worth setting out on its own, because it answers a question Newton’s law does not: why matter is in lumps at all.

1. Atoms scattered thinly. Each one lowers the Aether pressure around it a little.
2. Where atoms happen to sit closer together, those lows overlap and add. That patch is lower than its surroundings.
3. A lower patch has a gradient at its edge. Every Aetheron in every nearby atom feels it and is pushed inward.
4. Those atoms arrive. Now there are more in the same place, so the depression is deeper and the gradient steeper.
5. A steeper gradient draws from further out, and faster.

Depletion adds. Adding deepens. Deepening draws.

Nothing has to be arranged. A thin scatter of atoms is unstable the moment any patch is slightly denser than another, because the deeper patch pulls harder, and pulling harder makes it deeper.

Two things this explains that the force law does not

Why gravity only attracts. Every atom depletes; none of them fills. So every patch is lower than empty space and never higher, and there is no way to build a region that pushes matter away. One sign only, and it follows from the mechanism rather than being a separate fact about the force.

Why it does not stop on its own. There is no equilibrium on the way in. Each step makes the next step stronger, so something else has to intervene to halt it — which is why collapse is the default state of matter and why anything that is not collapsing is being held up by something.

3. Two Old Ideas, Never Joined

Almost nothing in this memo is new in isolation. Both halves of the mechanism were proposed in the nineteenth century, by people who had good reasons for them, and both were abandoned for good reasons too. What has not been done before is putting them in the same object.

Riemann, 1853: matter as a sink

In an unpublished manuscript a year before his famous lecture on geometry, Riemann proposed that the universe is filled with a substance he called Stoff which runs into atoms and fades away. Matter, on that account, is a set of sinks in an incompressible medium, and the inward stream they create carries other bodies along with it. He suggested the absorbed medium passes into another world or dimension.

It gives gravity straight away, because a sink in an incompressible fluid has a 1/r field by construction. What it does not give is any reason for matter to exist, be stable, or come in fixed kinds. A sink is a hole; Riemann had no account of what makes one.

Kelvin, 1867: matter as a vortex

Fourteen years later Kelvin wrote to Helmholtz that a vortex ring in an aether would be as permanent as the hard atoms of Lucretius, and proposed that atoms are vortex rings. Helmholtz had shown in 1858 that such a ring in an inviscid fluid can be neither created nor destroyed, which gave atomic permanence for free. Different elements were to be different knots, and Tait built the first knot tables to catalogue them.

It gives stability, variety and a reason for fixed kinds. What it does not give is gravity. Kelvin’s fluid is source-free — nothing is drawn in anywhere — and the far field of any vortex in such a fluid falls off as a dipole or faster. There is no 1/r term available.

Kelvin knew this. He worried that the vortex atom could not account for inertia or gravitational attraction, and in 1898 wrote that he was afraid it was not possible to explain all the properties of matter by the vortex-atom theory alone. The programme was abandoned shortly after, when the electron was found and the aether was not.

What this memo does with them

One tradition had the sink and no stability. The other had the stability and no sink. They ran in parallel for half a century, in the same country, among people who corresponded with each other, and nobody put them together.

The last row is the difference that matters. Riemann’s sinks destroy the medium, which is why he had to send it to another dimension. The machine proposed here keeps nothing: the same Aether that enters at the waist leaves along the axis, and only the pressure is lower. That is what allows a monopole without any accumulation of mass, which is what the measurements require.

Kelvin had the ring and no gravity. Riemann had the gravity and no ring. The through-flow is what turns one into the other.

And what is not new

Sink-flow derivations of the inverse square have been published since, independently of this work, and the hydrodynamic argument in section 8 is not claimed as original. Nor is Darcy’s law, nor Poisson’s equation, nor the observation that the two have the same form.

What is offered here is the combination, and one thing neither tradition had: the machine is observed.

What The Universal Dynamo supplies that Kelvin could not have

Riemann and Kelvin were arguing from mechanics alone. They had a theorem, a smoke ring and an intuition, and nothing to check any of it against. 5.22 The Universal Dynamo supplies four things they did not have, and could not have had:

Kelvin had a smoke ring and a theorem. The Universal Dynamo has a tornado with a probe driven into it, a hurricane flown through, and a quasar whose jets have been shown by neutrino detection to carry protons. The machine stopped being hypothetical somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, and nobody went back to the vortex atom afterwards.

The Universal Dynamo establishes the machine. This memo asks what it does to the Aether it runs on.

4. The Atom’s Outputs

The machine is described in 5.22 The Universal Dynamo. What matters here is only what comes out of it, and that is a short list. Every item is a constraint on any account of the mechanism.

The types identified so far

The outputs above are the same for every atom in one respect and different in another. Every one draws at the waist, and that is what makes gravity. What differs is what the poles do.

Only B has a direction, and a direction is a property of one atom. What happens next is not a property of the atom at all — it is how several of them sit relative to each other.

Nothing changes about the atoms between those four. Only the orientation does, and that is set by the spacing of the crystal they sit in. Section 5 takes it further; the rest of this memo needs nothing from any of it beyond the waist.

One of these produces gravity and one of them constrains it. The drawdown makes the depression. The heat ceiling is what the account must fit inside.

On the heat, which is likely rather than absent

Every working machine sheds some heat. An air turbine warms its casing; a pump warms its fluid. If the atom takes work out of a flow, the expectation is that some heat is produced — and the honest position is that none has been found, not that none exists.

Two things make it hard to find. The first is size: the ceilings above are a few parts in 10¹² of a watt per kilogram, and anything below that is invisible.

The second is worse. A per-nucleon source would appear in every material equally, because a kilogram of lead holds within one per cent of the same number of nucleons as a kilogram of aluminium. It would show as a uniform background in everything, including every control sample — which is exactly the kind of signal that gets measured once, called the instrument baseline, and subtracted before any result is computed.

So it cannot be found by comparing one material against another. It can only be found by a whole-body budget, or by looking for an offset that scales with mass rather than with surface area or wiring. That measurement has not been made.

The measurement is set out in Aether Proofs, not here — what this memo needs from the atom is the drawdown, not what becomes of the work.

5. Magnetism Explained

If the Aether carries gravity it should carry other things, and the obvious candidate is magnetism. This section says only what magnetism settles about gravity. The mechanism itself belongs to a separate memo, Magnetism, Atomic Dynamos, Aether, which is in preparation.

Two multipoles of one medium

What that settles about gravity

A magnet does not weigh more. A dipole has no monopole term — integrate it over a sphere and it cancels exactly, as much flow out of the north as into the south. Magnetise a bar of iron and its mass does not move by one part in 10¹². So whatever the aligned atoms are doing, they are not deepening the depression.

And gravity has one sign because every atom draws. None of them fills. Every patch of space is lower than empty space and never higher, so there is no way to build a region that pushes matter away. Magnetism has two signs because a circulation has a direction and two of them can oppose. That is the difference between a sink and a loop, and it is why one is universal and the other is not.

Two things are needed, not one: the machine must have a direction, and the directions must agree.

Line those directed machines up and each one’s outflow feeds the next one’s intake. What leaves the top of the chain loops round the outside and returns to the bottom — a closed circuit, with the material as the pump and the surrounding space as the return leg.

Faraday mapped those loops with iron filings in 1831. Nothing here redraws them; it reads them as flow.

The same medium, doing two different things. Gravity is what it does when matter removes; magnetism is what it does when matter circulates.

Whether the atom is asymmetric in its own right, or whether the direction belongs to a chain of them, is not settled and is not needed here. What matters for this memo is the first row of that table: the depression is a monopole, and a monopole is what makes gravity universal.

6. Why It Would Have Gone Unnoticed

We sit in a medium at something of order 10¹⁶ pascals — the exact figure turns on A5 — and have never felt it, for the same reason a fish does not feel water. Pressure that presses equally on every side is invisible. Only a difference is detectable — a gradient, a wind, a leak.

There is a precedent, and it is exact. In 1643 Torricelli worked out that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air pressing at 10⁵ Pa, about ten tonnes on a person. Nobody had noticed in the whole of recorded history, and it took a barometer to find it — a difference made on purpose.

On this account gravity is the only place the Aether pressure is not uniform, and therefore the only part of it anyone has ever felt.

7. The Assumptions

Nothing below is fitted. Where a number depends on A5 it is flagged, because that figure is the least secure input in the memo.

8. The Theorem

Three equations, none of them new. They are the set used for oil moving through sandstone.

Combined, these give the reservoir diffusivity equation, with hydraulic diffusivity η = k/(φμc_t):

In steady state the time term drops:

And Newtonian gravity is:

What is being sunk

S is a sink term, and the memo has to say what it removes. Not Aether: the same amount leaves an atom as arrives, which is why nothing accumulates and why Earth’s GM has not moved in fifty years of tracking. What the atom removes is pressure. The Aether passes through and leaves at a lower pressure than it arrived at, and that shortfall is the sink.

It matters which. A source and a sink of equal strength in the same place cancel, and their field falls as 1/d³ with no 1/d term at all. An atom that took Aether and kept it would make a depression; an atom that passes it through unchanged would make none. An atom that passes it through at lower pressure makes one without keeping anything — and that is the arrangement the measurements require.

What follows from it

Outside matter S = 0, so equation (2) becomes Laplace’s, whose spherically symmetric solution is 1/r. The depression falls as 1/r and its gradient as 1/d². The inverse square is not chosen; it is what the equation gives, exactly as it gives the drawdown curve around a producing well.

Inside matter, if every nucleon draws the same volume rate Q, then S = (ρ/m_p)Q, and equating (2) with (3):

ρ cancels from both sides. The field comes out proportional to mass without that being assumed or fitted. Every push account of gravity since Fatio put it to Newton in the 1690s has had to bolt the equivalence principle on afterwards; here it falls out of Poisson’s equation.

And G is no longer a bare constant

The Aether’s viscosity, its flow coefficient and each nucleon’s draw are not independent quantities. Their combination is G. Pin any two and the third follows.

Flow and restriction. That is what G measures.

9. Two Properties, Not One

Any medium that carries a flow has two separate properties, and they are independent of each other. How easily it moves, and how much it holds. Electricity has both, a fluid has both, and neither one tells you the other.

A copper wire carries current well and light badly. Glass is the reverse. Gravel lets fluid through and holds almost none; shale holds a great deal and lets almost nothing pass. Knowing one property tells you nothing about the other.

The pressure response

The combination η = k/(φμc_t), hydraulic diffusivity, is what governs how fast a disturbance spreads. It has units of area over time, and the distance the news has travelled after a time t is roughly √(ηt) — the radius of investigation.

This is measured every day, and the measurement is a well test. Flow the well, shut it in, and watch the pressure come back. The shape of the recovery gives the permeability; the rate of it gives the diffusivity. Two properties, one test.

Which of these the Aether has, and which it does not

Known: the flow is restricted, and that follows from there being a depression at all. Unrestricted flow means zero drawdown, which means no gravity, so the restriction is not an inconvenience in the account — it is the mechanism.

Known: one combination — (μ/k)·Q = 4πG·ρ_am_p.

Not known: the permeability on its own, the viscosity on its own, the draw per nucleon on its own, or the Aether’s compressibility. And therefore not the response time either.

The model has the ratio that produces gravity, and none of the three numbers inside it.

10. The Reservoir Form

The steady spherical Darcy solution is the well-test equation, and it is worth writing in the form an engineer would recognise:

A planet is a spherical sink in a porous medium, and gravity is its drawdown curve.

Two restrictions, and only one sets the law

Inside a body the Aether squeezes past 10⁵¹ atoms — that is the flow coefficient of matter. But the gradient reaches Neptune, where there is no matter to squeeze past. The restriction that produces the inverse square belongs to the lattice, not to matter. Matter’s own porosity matters only inside the body, and only as the correction in section 15.

11. Flow Through Mass

Inside a body the Aether has two jobs. It has to reach the atoms that are drawing it, and it has to get past the atoms already there to reach the ones deeper in. In a rock those are porosity and tortuosity: how much of the volume is open, and how winding the path through it is.

So how open is matter, to this flow? The shielding ceiling of section 15 gives the answer, because it is the same question asked from the other side. Each nucleon can block at most 2.4 × 10⁻⁴⁷ m², which is about 10⁻¹⁷ of its own geometric shadow.

Matter is essentially transparent to this flow. The whole Earth blocks about one part in a billion.

That is why gravity is proportional to mass and why nothing shields it. An atom at the centre of the planet is drawing from a medium that has barely noticed the eight thousand kilometres of rock it came through.

And light says the opposite

Put the same materials in front of light and they are not transparent at all. A metre of water slows it by a quarter, glass by a third, diamond by more than half.

A metre of water slows light by 25 per cent and restricts the Aether flow by one part in 10¹⁷. The same substance, two properties, sixteen orders of magnitude apart.

That is not a contradiction. It is the two pairs of section 9 doing exactly what they do in every other medium: a copper wire carries current well and light badly, glass the reverse. Matter interferes enormously with the wave and almost not at all with the flow.

12. Flow Through Space

Which leaves the restriction that produces gravity somewhere else entirely. If matter is 99.9999999 per cent open, the depression is not made by the Aether squeezing past atoms. It is made in the Aether itself, over astronomical distances.

That needs care, because Darcy’s law describes a fluid moving through a solid matrix, and the series has already settled what the Aether is. Memo 1.4 shows that light is a transverse wave, that a fluid cannot carry one, and that the Aether is therefore a lattice — a solid stiffer than diamond. A solid has no flow coefficient for itself.

So the k in section 8 is the lattice’s flow coefficient for whatever moves through it. The lattice stays put and carries light; something seeps through its interstices and is drawn toward matter. That is an ordinary arrangement, not a strange one — palladium is a solid metal and hydrogen walks straight through it. Empty space is not empty on this account. It is the matrix.

The Sun’s depression reaches Neptune through four and a half billion kilometres of that lattice, and the 1/r shape holds the whole way.

So the two flows are different problems with different answers:

The lattice restricts more than matter does. That is the opposite of the intuition, and it is what the numbers say.

13. Is There Enough?

The obvious objection is that there cannot be enough Aether at the centre of a planet to keep 10⁵¹ machines running. Section 1 showed the answer as a picture; here are the figures behind it, taking deep space as a full tank and zero as an empty one:

Earth’s centre draws down two parts in a billion. Only a neutron star draws it down visibly, and a black hole is where the tank runs out — which gives the horizon a meaning on this account rather than leaving it a postulate.

14. The Cavendish Experiment, Step By Step

Cavendish weighed the world in 1798 with two lead balls and a wire. It is still the smallest force anyone measures deliberately, and it is worth walking through in this account’s terms — because every step has a number, and because the last step is the one that matters.

Take a modern version: a 1.5 kg lead sphere, a 15 g bob on a torsion fibre, five centimetres apart. The force between them is 0.60 nanonewtons, which is the weight of about sixty nanograms.

1. The lead is put in place

It holds 9.0 × 10²⁶ nucleons. Each draws Aether through itself, and the total draw is 8.1 × 10⁻¹⁹ cubic metres a second. Nothing is kept; the same Aether leaves at the poles of every atom in it.

2. The depression forms

The pressure around the lead falls, and the signal reaches the bob’s position in 167 picoseconds — the time light takes to cross five centimetres. Gravitational waves are measured travelling at c to one part in 10¹⁵, which is what fixes that. On any laboratory timescale the gradient is simply there, the moment the lead is.

3. The bob sits in the gradient

At five centimetres the shell area is 314 square centimetres, so the inflow speed there is 26 attometres per second. At that rate a parcel of Aether would take sixty million years to cross the gap between the two spheres.

The bob is not carried along by that flow — it is far too slow to carry anything. What acts on the bob is the gradient, and the gradient is the same quantity as the flow rate, in proportion.

Seen in plan, the bob digs a small depression of its own and sits on the flank of the lead’s. Where the contours crowd, the gradient is steep; where they spread, it is gentle. The bob is pushed toward the side where the lines are closer together.

4. The pressure difference across the bob

The lead’s field at that distance is 4.0 × 10⁻⁸ m/s². Across the bob’s 13.6 mm diameter that makes a pressure difference of 4.9 × 10⁻¹⁰ pascals.

The ambient Aether pressure is of order 10¹⁶ pascals. So the difference the experiment detects is about six parts in 10²⁷ of the pressure the bob is sitting in. The bob is squeezed from every side by an enormous pressure, and it moves because one side is squeezed six parts in a thousand trillion trillion less hard than the other.

5. And it is Newton’s answer

The force comes out the same, because the inverse square comes from the same equation. There is no measurable difference between this account and Newton’s for any Cavendish experiment ever performed or proposed. That is not a weakness; a mechanism that disagreed with Cavendish would already be wrong.

What it adds is two numbers Newton does not have — the inflow speed at the bob, and the pressure difference across it. Neither has been measured, and neither is within reach of any instrument now built.

This is why the departures in section 15 matter. Cavendish cannot tell the two accounts apart; only the places where the flow picture predicts something extra can.

One place where it might

Step 2 above says the depression forms at the speed of light. That is true of a pressure disturbance, and it is not the same question as how long the depression takes to settle. Settling is a diffusion, with a time of roughly L²/η, and the model has no value for η.

A torsion balance cannot answer that by watching the bob, because the beam itself takes a quarter of its period — a minute or more — to reach a new equilibrium. But it can answer it by comparison: place the lead and wait an hour before releasing the bob, then repeat with both done at once. The mechanical response is identical; the only difference is how long the Aether has had to settle.

That measurement has not been made, and it would give the first value for how fast this medium passes a pressure change. It is set out in Aether Proofs.

15. Where It Departs From Newton

Shielding. Atoms deep inside a body sit in medium already drawn down, so they should contribute less, and gravity would go sub-linear in mass. That is Le Sage’s old problem, and it is why Newton did not take up the idea. Measurement says gravity is linear across more than twenty orders of magnitude.

For the shielding to stay below one part in 10⁹, each nucleon’s effective cross-section must be under 2.4 × 10⁻⁴⁷ m² — about 10⁻¹⁷ of the proton’s own geometric area. That is the same order as a neutrino–nucleon cross-section at MeV energies, which is why neither has been noticed.

Non-Darcy flow. Darcy’s law is linear only at low Reynolds number. Above about Re = 1 to 10 the Forchheimer term takes over — −dp/dx = (μ/k)v + βρv² — and the drawdown stops being 1/r.

The highest velocity is at the centre of a mass, so if this account departs from the inverse square anywhere, it is deep inside very dense bodies, and it shows as gravity weakening there. The crossover sits at Re = ρv√k/μ = 1 and cannot be placed until k and μ are pinned. It is the first thing this model predicts that Newton does not.

16. Where The Argument Stops

The figures

Figures marked † carry the deep-space density, which is an estimate rather than a measurement (A5). They move if that figure moves; the others do not.

• Deep-space Aether pressure: p = ρc², of order 10¹⁶ Pa †, against an atmosphere at 10⁵.
• What Earth’s centre uses: 2.1 × 10⁻⁹ of the available pressure. The tank is 99.9999998 % full.
• The match: (μ/k)·Q = 4πG·ρ_am_p †.
• G, restated: G = μQ / (4πk ρ_am_p).
• The shielding ceiling: each nucleon’s cross-section must be under 2.4 × 10⁻⁴⁷ m² — 10⁻¹⁷ of its own geometric area, and the same order as a neutrino’s.
• Torricelli, 1643: ten tonnes of air on a person, unnoticed for the whole of recorded history until someone built a barometer.

Terms Used Here

The series glossary is on the Terms page and governs every memo. The entries below are the ones this memo adds, all of them from porous-flow engineering.

Sources

Reference codes read source.work.passage and resolve on the Master Source Register, which carries every source used across this series.

1. Darcy, H. (1856), Les fontaines publiques de la ville de Dijon — the flow law in section 8. Standard.
2. Poisson, S. D. (1813) — the form of Newtonian gravity used in equation (3). Standard.
3. Torricelli, E. (1643) — atmospheric pressure and the barometer, section 6. Standard.
4. Fatio de Duillier, N. (1690s) and Le Sage, G.-L. (1748) — push gravity and the shielding objection, section 15. Standard.
5. Eötvös-type experiments — equal acceleration of different materials to one part in 10¹⁵. Carried as reported; to be pinned before v1.0.
6. CODATA — G, the proton mass, and the planetary masses and radii used in section 13. Standard reference values.
7. Memo in preparation — Magnetism, Atomic Dynamos, Aether, on the second thing the medium does. This section states only what magnetism settles about gravity; the mechanism belongs there.
8. Memo proposed, not yet written — Aether Proofs, carrying the two measurements that would test the mechanism directly: a steady temperature offset scaling with mass rather than with surface area or wiring (section 4), and a Cavendish settling test for the response time (section 14). Referenced in sections 4 and 14 and in the ledger.
9. Series memos relied on — 5.22 The Universal Dynamo for the machine, T.5.1 Gravity for the depression (there called the dent), and 1.12 Actions Of The Aether.
10. Cavendish, H. (1798), Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth, Philosophical Transactions — the torsion-balance measurement walked through in section 14. Modern values for the worked example are typical of a teaching apparatus rather than from any one published experiment. Standard; the example figures are illustrative.
11. Verification register — carried as reported and not settled here: the Eötvös precision figure; the twenty-orders-of-magnitude range over which gravity is measured proportional to mass; and the neutrino–nucleon cross-section used for comparison in section 15.